Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday April 02, 2012 @11:05PM
from the did-i-say-fifteen-i-meant-eighteen dept.

dotarray writes "The introduction of an R18+ rating for video games into Australia has been designed to bring game classification in line with the current system in place for films and other media. One state, however, would like to widen that gap."
This is being billed (by John Rau's office) as a saner approach than eliminating the MA15+ rating entirely.

Why is there still political uproar over games after all these years? It may have been understandable in the mid-1990s when Doom and Mortal Kombat were portraying a level of violence people hadn't seen in games before in such detail, but that time has passed without effect, and the attention given to games today feels disproportionate. It's just an easy, uncontroversial issue for politicians to pick up in order to appeal to family-first voters.

I'm not saying I believe this, correlation is not causation. But, you could argue that spikes in school shootings are caused by violent video games. Columbine the first highly publicized school shooting happend in 1999 shortly after violent video games became main stream. That could easily be cited as the effect you claim non-existant.

An average politician is still of an age where they have no first-hand experience with games.Art, music, film and now games; it has always been this way and, regretably, will probably continue to be so in the future.The unenlightened masses of our generation will blame future media for whatever bad happens to the youth then.A society rarely learns from it's mistakes. As they say; individuals are smart, people are stupid.Thanks $deity I'm not cynical;)

Why shouldn't games have this uproar? Movies, music, books and comics/strips/manga have had and often continue to have the same response. Rap anyone? Strips (European comics) were considered to rot the minds of youths (only the good ones) before they became accepted as an art in their own right (only the boring ones).

Doom and Mortal combat had their opposition but that doesn't mean that was done and over with. By that logic, after people stopped having a heart attack of Elvis Presley's hip movements, all ot

Human nature. We tend to overlook what is common to us and villainize what is different. Politics, religion, what drugs get outlawed, etc. The same too for mediums such as this.

Socrates, allegedly since we only have Plato's writings to go on about him here, felt writing was dangerous thing. Then you had books, people who thought plays were immoral, television, the Internet, so forth.

As XKCD made a comic about, there are now kids who were blowing their NES cartridges (the memories...) who are now doctors

Way to over-generalize facts that you pulled out of your ass, kid. I'm 39 and I grew up with videogames. The Atari 2600 was released in October 1977, when I was five years old. The Computer Space arcade game was released in 1971, roughly one year before I was even born.

I can make up facts too, check this out: People over 25 never used compact discs in their life, all they know is MP3 files.

1983 In Australia, how do I know, I was five when it came out.
The Atari 2600 sold 30 million units over it's entire life span throughout the entire world, so not that many people. For comparison, Nintendo sold that many Wii's in it's first year and the 2600 was sold from 1977 to 1992.

Further more, on release it cost US$199. Add to that the AUD fetched US$0.70 in 83, that's $260 for the console. That would be if things were actually priced according to the

The Atari 2600 sold 30 million units over it's entire life span throughout the entire world, so not that many people. For comparison, Nintendo sold that many Wii's in it's first year and the 2600 was sold from 1977 to 1992.

Further more, on release it cost US$199. Add to that the AUD fetched US$0.70 in 83, that's $260 for the console. That would be if things were actually priced according to the exchange rate. The real cost of an Atari 2600 in Australia was $400 in 1983 dollars (cant be arsed figuring out inflation). Now the average wage in 1983 was around the $350-380 mark.

So armed with those facts, I can say not that many people over 35 grew up with consoles.

Gaming really made it's mark in the 90's with the NES/SNES and their inferior Sega counterparts (punk kids, think their console war is a new thing).

The thing we're facing now, is that gaming has gone from being a new innovation to an accepted part of life and this shows a huge generation gap between the under 35's who grew up with gaming and the over 35's who didn't. There may be some over 35's who gamed but the overwhelming majority didn't.

So nice way to over-generalise and pull facts out of your arse (generalise and arse spelled correctly for a discussion about Australia, thank you). You dont even have decent supposition to support your argument and yes, I did register your sample of 1, you are the anomaly, not the norm.

I'm 36. Most of the people I knew had Atari's when I was a child. Myself, I was programming on a VIC 20 in grade school. Both were available at Canadian Tire for a pretty reasonable price. Commodore 64's were so inexpensive I was able to pay for mine with my paper route. I spent junior high school swapping C64 games on 5 1/2 inch floppy disks. One of my favorites was the barbarian sword fighting game, where if you got just the right finishing move, you'd decapitate your opponent and the little green goblin that drags the body away kicks his head like a soccer ball. Great fun.

Hell, we even had portable versions of Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Q~bert for long car trips.

And, of course, if you were really too poor to own any of the above, there were arcade machines EVERYWHERE.

Maybe you just need to recognize that, inane sarcasm about sample sizes aside, you don't have the slightest clue what you're fucking talking about. Of course, you're quite free to continue believing fiction if you like.

The size was 5 1/4" for those floppy disks. And if you want to be dated there are the single sided and double sided, standard density, double density, and high density.I have fond memories of the Single Sided Disks where when running a program it would ask me to flip the disk over and press any key.The 3 1/2 that were in a much harder plastic and those nifty spring loaded covers that meant you didn't need to fiddle with those paper/cardboard cloths, and plastic switches to make the disk read only or not.

As someone that was 10 when the atari came out in Australia, I had one, many of my friends at School had one (and we lived in a country town) as we traded games regularly at school. So I can say you are full of shit, not to mention atari was hardly the first or only videogaming experience of the time. if you want to target an age group that grew up without videogames you most definitely need to add at least 5 years to your demographic, most probably more.

Well, so did my friends have those but I were only one who had girlfriends (not just one) and we were having fun together. Yes, we played, sometimes even with those home computers as well, but usually we "socialized". And there were no facebook or any other shit to ruin our lives. Everyone know everyone and where people was.

1983 In Australia, how do I know, I was five when it came out. The Atari 2600 sold 30 million units over it's entire life span throughout the entire world, so not that many people. For comparison, Nintendo sold that many Wii's in it's first year and the 2600 was sold from 1977 to 1992.

One thing I noticed when visiting Australia is the number of places advertising "parallel imports" and obviously imported stuff for sale from private parties sold as "new". I think that the 2600 was on sale in Australia November 1977. And 30 million may not be many for a world of billions, but *everyone* I know played a 2600 as a child, even if only at a friend's house. I never owned one, but I've played at least 5 on a regular basis at one point or another.

Actually, it is more of a "wag the dog" type thing they are pulling.
Look at this hand trying to protect your family while the other hand takes away your right to competition, privacy, and underhandedness.

"politicians generalise like you and think only kids play computer games" You didn't say he thought that gaming was for kids, but you did say he is like politicians who think only kids play computer games, which could be taken to mean what you say you didn't say.

Where did i say you said you where against the 18+ rating?

A little creative editing (how people hear things) and the sentence comes out as "People like you [...] think only kids play computer games so there is no need for 18+ computer game rating."

Even if you think your sentence is technically correct, having to diagram the sentence to verify which clauses go with which subjects of a multi-subject, multi-clause sentence will likely cause a misunderstanding. Just because you are wrong doesn't mean you have to be a jackass about it.

Why is there still political uproar over games after all these years? It may have been understandable in the mid-1990s when Doom and Mortal Kombat were portraying a level of violence people hadn't seen in games before in such detail, but that time has passed without effect.

Because people over 35 haven't played games as a kid. Now the people over 35 are called "parents" and parents are worth 2 votes per policy.

Hand out a $20 note for a vote on election day and they call it corruption. Hand out $100 p/w for having a crotchspawn and they call it a policy.

Wow. Just wow. I am over 35 (39 actually) and I played games all the time as a kid and into my teens and ever since. Those games I played included Doom (over LAN). Are you that dumb? Heck, my generation and the one before me and my peers CREATED VIDEO GAMES.

I'll try to lighten the tone of my response (sorry mjwx, but you must have hit a nerve). What I was trying to say was that my generation and the generation before me actually created the whole genre of "video games". We played them (and I still play them) and we made them. We created tools to make more advanced games easier. For a bit of Monty Python comic relief, I would say that you kids these days have it easy. In my day we used to program in assembly, create our own wireframe models (on paper!), program

Really? Fooled me. I'm 42, and I had an Atari 2600 (Sears Video Arcase) when I was growing up. And a pong console. And an Atari 800, 65XL, 130XE, and two Atari ST's. I also ran a BBS (The largest in the midwest at the time), had 8 disk drives of various sizes at various times (5.25" SDSS, 5.25 DDSS, 3" SSSD, 3" DDDS, 5.25" HDDS), multiple modems MPPE, Hayes 300, and 1200 baud Duck Modem, 9600 USR Courier, 14.4K USR Courier, 19.2K USR Courier, etc etc. And a very large collection of games on each of tho

BTW, I'm 30 so I'm not that young. I just realise that games haven't reached the level of acceptance that TV has. Go back 20-30 years and TV had the same arguments rallied against it. They were without merit then and are just as merit-less now. Give it another 5-10 years when the median age of gamers is approaching 40 and games will be as accepted as TV.

I don't know how this particular piece of legislation is going to make the slightest bit of difference... since it's usually the parent buying the game for the kid anyway. One of the 9 year old kids at my daughters school brought in his latest game for the xbox the other day - Singularity, rated M. He is 9, and his dad thinks it's ok for him to play.

It affects the display of games. The R rated games won't be on display to minors, hence making sales difficult, even commercials for those games will be restricted. In terms of sales, it will still be better to adjust those games so that they can reach a wider audience. International advertising via the internet will confuse that issue.

Some games, those likely to appeal to a reduced audience will retain extremes in order to appeal to that reduced audience, the cheetos, reality TV, loving crowd, where gra

And that's as it should be. Parent takes responsibility and makes their choice. Said father has no right to go bitching and whining when his kid picks up behaviour from a game that he let his kid play.
Of course that won't stop him. Then he'll demand more legislation while bitching to his mates down the pub that there's no freedoms anymore, and never make the connection.

Kids pick up behaviour from everything. I grew up with lots of dogs in the house and still have bad habits loike sniffing my food and hitting stairs at a quadrapedal run.
Here's a concept - rather than more and more rules on what people can do to protect your precious little crotchfruit how's about taking some personal responsibility for that thing that came from you. Teach the kid right and wrong, don't leave it to Uncle TeVee or Aunty Internet. Teach them respect for themselves and other people and that gutter language doesn't make you look big, it makes you look like a child trying too hard to look big.
But I guess you've already done the easy/fun bit. Everything else is Someone Else's responsibility...
(BTW joebagofdonuts this isn't a personal rant at you - it's just a general What The hell Is Wrong With You All rant aimed at the world in general)

This particular kid already has issues with starting fights at the school.... I've actually met the father, he doesn't seem like the responsible type at all. He certainly struck me as the kind of parent who takes the attitude that "all video games are for children", which may well be contributing to this. His attitude is a fairly similar one amongst parents who didn't grow up with video games (unlike me and my wife who are both gamers, as are our children).

you hop on the Internet and order them from another State, South Australia is like, California or Colorado. That or we order them from another Asian nation, where we pay half the price for them. as In Australia game prices are stupid high.

If you want to, say, play left 4 dead 2 online on xbox, can you just buy a copy from one of those asian nations and go online with them? Australia having it's own region codes, you couldn't play it on an australian xbox, and couldn't play an asian version on an asian console in australia?

Most xbox games aren't actually region locked. For instance I buy many of my games from the US/Asia and sometimes the UK and I play them all happily on my Xbox in Australia. Some of the online content for games though is locked to specific regions (well at least they don't publish the content into regions where the game is supposedly not available).

Afaict consoles have traditionally used a three region system based on TV standards (NTSC/PAL/NTSC-J) which put australia in the same regoin as europe and most of asia. Afaict the xbox 360 still uses this system. The PS3 has it's own region system with more regions (not sure of the full list).

Reports i've seen online say that most xbox 360 and PS3 games are not actually region locked but there may be issues arround online play that vary by game and you are likely to have trouble purchasing DLC.

Germany banned Wolfenstein 3D. I went on an exchange to Germany when I was a teenager and asked the people I was saying with if they'd played it. All of them had - the difference was that none of them had paid for it. And that was before the Internet was widespread...

Well, yeah, but that's not the point, the point is that this "work around" is making some kids out there miss out in some way, so the law should be changed.

Anyway, maybe they want to play with their friends who don't have halfway decent PCs. Happened to me. The mouse and keyboard combination, along with much better graphics and better prices is great, but playing with friends you know trumps all that.

Wouldn't that mean you're illegally importing classified material? I'm not sure exactly how it works in Aussie, it may just be illegal to sell it...

It is only illegal to sell, or carry for sale, unclassified media.
Importing for personal use is completely ok.
There are other laws dealing with certain materials (i.e. goat porn, incest, sex involving minors).
A game that has been refused classification (not suitable for persons under 18) would be perfectly fine to import as long as it did not contain any of the aforementioned.

It's harder than that. It depends on where you are and what risks you want to take.

For example here in WA since we don't have and R18 rating for games, the games are refused classification. Simple possession of RC material is a criminal offense with maximum penalties including jail time, yes even for something like the last mortal kombat game.

It's thornier for movies such pornography though, for example anything with actual penetration is X18, but that classification only exists in Canberra. So its legal to walk into an adult shop and purchase a video there, you are allowed to own in in most states, but drive across the border to WA or NT and you can end up in jail.

You don't even need to be l33t, you just buy from another jurisdiction (whether interstate or overseas) that doesn't 'ban' them.

I put the word 'ban' in quotes because, in all Australian States except WA and NT, it is NOT illegal to own/watch/play RC (refused classification) material. It is merely illegal to be a business ~selling~ that material. It is the act of "selling unclassified material" that is illegal rather than anything about the content per se. For instance, even if it's an episode of a completel

There's no black market because the ruling only applies to games sold in Australia and really only affect brick and mortar stores. Where do I get my banned / uncensored versions of games?

Well aside from torrenting as the obvious place there's no reason you can't get them from ebay, or any online store which doesn't follow censorship rulings. Steam is a classically weird case. They're not an Australian company and they have no presence here so theoretically there's no reason for them to ban / censor games. H

While steam themselves may not have a presense in australia they almost certainly have partners who do. In particular some games are sold retail and activated on steam (i'm pretty sure L4D2 comes into this category). So it probablly pays them to pay lip service to australian regulations (while making it fairly easy to bypass them for those in the know) .

Just politicians demonstrating how irrelevant and out-of-touch with they are with society in general...

Imagine if they where trying to ban sales of a board game, or books? Talk about inappropriate usage of public funds!

Also, how ironic that they would target an age group of people who are just about to make the first political decision/vote in there life; Which way do you think they'll vote. First impression count much for you?

And who is this supposed to be scoring points for? Could it be that the

kids should not be able to buy content that is violent, graphic, has sex (not often) and mature themes. Theaters have been doing it for years. the target market for video games is kids, I am sure that had nothing to do with a lax rating system.

Let's rate sociopoltical issues by IQ/Intellectual Age, thereby preventing politicians at large from voicing any opinions/legislation about topics for which they are ignorant, ill informed or simply pandering for votes.

This might look like a good thing, but they're basically trying to undo the R18+ reforms, by making MA15+ the same as R18+. As many have pointed out, it will achieve nothing and add complication for retailers and buyers. Why can't we just accept the classifications boards definitions, like the rest of the states.

Under the legislation, movies like the Saw franchise can be seen by minors, but games like GTA and Mortal combat can't be played.

A rating of 15+ or 18+ is not prohibition, kids. It just means you should take your parents to the shop to buy you that 15+ or 18+ game. If they buy it for you, no government is going to stop you from blowing some virtual guy's head off.

Therefore, my intention is that the South Australian legislation will prevent the sale of MA15+ games to minors. This move will give parents greater certainty about the appropriateness of games for their children.

From what I gather, the aim is to make parents/guardians responsible for the content they are viewing/playing, and forcing them (or anyone over 18) to be there at the time of purchase.

MA15+ (Mature Accompanied for those under 15) - Persons under said age may only legally purchase, rent, exhibit or view MA15+ rated content under the supervision of an adult guardian. The exhibition of these films to people under the age of 15 years who are not supervised by an adult guardian is a criminal offence. Recommended for 14-15+.

Six States... and two Territories (ACT and NT). While they are constitutionally treated a bit differently than the states (e.g. less representatives in the Federal Senate), they both also have their own legislatures/governments.

So for most intents and purposes, Australia has 8 separate 'subdivisions' that are analogous to States in the USA (even if two of them are not technically States).

It's a state within Australia. We have several, including one which looks like a hairy vagina that we all forget about when we draw a map.

South Australia's capital is called Adelaide. It's nickname is the City of Churches because it has a crapload of churches and a proportionate number of wacko religious fucknuts to go with it. Sunday trading is still an issue and newcomers to the state are hazed by being murdered and dissolve in acid in a barrel and left in a bank vault. Their courts are full of lesbian vampire murderers. Weirdly enough they have a relaxed attitude towards dope and you can have a certain number of plants for "personal use". I call it a place to retire.

That was Brisbane (and across the street from where I lived once) unless Adelaide had that as well. The bodies in barrels in a bank vault (Snowtown) was definitely in South Australia though. They grow strange people in politics and good bands there.

Wrong government. The reason it's taken over a decade to sort out ratings on games one way or another is due to State governments playing petty politics to get a cheap "for the children" vote. If the games were grouped with films and handled at a Federal level this would have been over one way or another well over a decade ago. Idiots have jumped in to try to prove they are relevant and can "protect the kiddies" even though all they can really do is gum up the work

Only if you live in a place where you need to actually refer to South Africa often enough to need an acronym for it. That'd be like complaining that WA refers to Washington state in America instead of Western Australia. Or that CA can be California (state code), or Canada (country code). All depends on where you are.

But if you really want to get pedantic, SA (or technically, AU-SA) is the official state code for South Australia under ISO 3166-2. South Africa is ZA.